Art from the Baroque Period to the Postmodern Era The history of Renaissance art began as civic history; it was an expression of civic pride. The first of these stories was Filippo Villani's De origine civitatis Florentiae et eiusdem famas civibus, written around 1381-82. Florentine artists revived an almost dead art, Villani claims, just as Dante had restored poetry after its decline in the Middle Ages. The revival was begun by Cimabue and completed by Giotto, who equaled the ancient painters in fame and even surpassed them in skill and talent. After Giotto came his followers, Stefano, Taddeo Gaddi and Maso, all illustrious men, who together with notable jurists, poets, musicians, theologians, doctors, orators and others made Florence the pre-eminent city of Italy. Cino Rinuccini, following Villani, published a roll of honor of illustrious men of Florence, including artists. And Cristoforo Landino wrote in the same sense in a better-known work that appeared in 1481; the Preface to his Commentary on the Divine Comedy contains a recapitulation of the painting of the classical world followed by a brief history of modern art, that is, of Florentine art, starting from Cimabue and Giotto and enumerating the contributions of the masters of the fifteenth century: Masaccio , Lippi, Castagno, Uccello, Beato Angelico, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Desiderio, Ghiberti and the two Rossellinis. Although not in any sense a history, Alberti's De pictura of 1435-36, like these works, contains a list--a very abbreviated one--of great Florentine artists: Brunelleschi, Donatello, Luca della Robbia, Ghiberti, and Masaccio. And, most importantly, the list is part of a commendation similar in type to those cited: Brunelleschi, like Villani's Giotto, has... half the paper... the quality of architecture in these countries is the best seen in the work of Neumann and Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach. From Europe the Baroque spread across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World. Gradually the massive forms of the Baroque gave way to the lighter and more graceful contours of the Rococo. References Baxandall, M., Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350-1450, Oxford, 1971. Bellori, GP, Le vite detpittori, scultori etarchitettura moderni), Rome, 1672. and. E. Borea, introduction. G. Previtali, Turin, 1976. Goldstein, C., Visual Fact over Verbal Fiction: A Study of the Carracci and the Criticism, Theory, and Practice of Painting in Renaissance and Byzantine Italy, Cambridge, 1988. Malvasia, CC, Felsina pittrice : Lives of the Bolognese painters (Bologna, 1678), ed. M. Brascaglia, Bologna,1971.